Day: July 26, 2016

Hillary Hate Is Nothing New

We hear a lot about all the hate and dislike that some have for the Dem nominee Hillary Clinton,  but this is not a story…..anyone that was around in 2008 and her battle with Obama will remember all the hate spewed forth about both candidates from the different directions….but 8 years later the hate and dislike are from a different angle than in 2008……

I admit it I was not a supporter in 2008 and definitely am not in 2016…she never has been likeable at least in my book…..

Supporters of Hillary Clinton who feel she’s on the receiving end of undue amounts of sheer hatred might want to read an analysis on the subject at Slate by Michelle Goldberg. It doesn’t refute that this hatred exists—in fact, the piece revisits articles on the same theme from 20 years ago or longer. Lots of people have always hated Clinton, it seems. But after interviewing voters on the subject, Goldberg concludes that why she’s hated has changed over time. “Strikingly, the reasons people commonly give for hating Clinton now are almost the exact opposite of the reasons people gave for hating her in the 1990s,” writes Goldberg. “Back then, she was a self-righteous ideologue; now she’s a corrupt tool of the establishment. Back then, she was too rigid; now she’s too flexible.”

Goldberg’s piece includes snippets from her interviews with voters of different ages and political perspectives (“programmed and almost robotic,” says a 49-year-old man; “disingenuous and she lies blatantly,” says a 31-year-old woman). But the animosity doesn’t seem to stem from policy, writes Goldberg. “It’s also driven by some ineffable quality of charisma, or the lack of it,” and she chalks up some of this to gender: “Americans tend not to like ambitious women with loud voices.” The piece also suggests that winding up with Donald Trump as an opponent might be a stroke of luck for Clinton, because Trump’s attacks on Bill Clinton’s infidelity might be the one thing that softens independent and moderate GOP women toward her. Read the full piece. (Or click to read another assessment of her likability.)

2016 is an amazing election….we have 2 candidates from the major parties that have zero likeability with the voters, at least according to the polls……

I am looking elsewhere….how about you?  I always liked the color Green……

Dem “Gong Show”–Day One….Part Deux…..

We Americans live and breath for winners and losers….winners we worship and losers we hate…..so how does the 2016 Dem convention stack up for the winners and the losers?

There was no shortage of drama on Day 1 of the Democratic National Convention, though the day appeared to end with a more unified party, with Michelle Obama delivering what could be the convention’s best speech and Bernie Sanders telling the Philadelphia crowd that Hillary Clinton “must become the next president.” Here’s who analysts say had a good day, or a terrible day.

Among the winners:

  • Michelle Obama. She didn’t just give a great speech, she gave the “best speech of Hillary Clinton’s career,” according to Glenn Thrush at Politico. She “delivered a more passionate and concise case for Clinton than the candidate has ever made for herself—and perhaps the single most effective political address delivered in 2016,” he writes
  • Bernie Sanders. Some 14 months after he launched his campaign from the “outskirts of American politics,” Sanders received a “hero’s welcome” from an emotional crowd Monday night, writes Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post. His speech was was, “essentially, a confirmation that he was right about almost everything and Clinton now understood that fact,” Cillizza writes.
  • Sarah Silverman. Her off-the-cuff line to hecklers—”To the Bernie-or-bust people, you’re being ridiculous”—got one of the night’s biggest cheers. It came after what the Guardian calls “one of the speeches of the night, with a thoughtful exposition of the argument for switching from Sanders to Clinton.”

Among the losers:

  • Debbie Wasserman Schultz. The soon-to-be former Democratic National Committee chief had a terrible day by anybody’s reckoning. She decided against opening the convention after she was heavily booed and heckled when speaking to Florida delegates Monday morning.
  • Cory Booker. The New Jersey senator tried a little too hard to launch himself on the national stage with his Monday night speech, which “felt too rehearsed, too plotted—and, without question, way, way too long,” according to Cillizza at the Post. “The speech could have been half as long and twice as good.”
  • The Trans-Pacific Partnership. The rhetoric against the trade deal from speakers including Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders was almost indistinguishable from what Donald Trump has to say about it, despite the fact that it was negotiated by the sitting Democratic president notes Dylan Matthews at Vox. He predicts that the deal will now die under either Clinton or Trump “if Obama can’t push it through in the lame-duck session.

On to day two and the “Gong Show” continues…..

The Dem “Gong Show”–Day One

The “Gong Show” is for all those old farts that remember probably the greatest game show ever aired……

The Dem Convention opened up with a really big announcement….Wasserman-Schultz is out but not down…..The Democratic National Convention opened Monday marred by the sudden resignation of its unpopular chairwoman after a series of leaked emails suggested she might have used her office to help Hillary Clinton defeat the insurgent candidacy of Sen. Bernie Sanders.

The night began where I thought it would….trying to neutralize the email fallout….also all speakers up to Cory Booker was all about…blah blah blah…..Hillary good…..blah blah blah….vote for Hillary…..blah….Trump scary…..blah…..the usual Dem heavy hitters….Sanders…..Warren…..

But it got good with the speak by Booker…….good because the media hound that he is…it was his “look at me” speech for the Dems in the next election….

New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker had one thing on his mind at Philly’s Wells Fargo Center: love and equality for all. With a rapt Bill Clinton watching in the audience, a hoarse-voiced Booker—who some Twitter users said brought “church” to the convention with his passion—used the city where the Declaration of Independence was signed as the backdrop to declare: “No matter who you are, rich or poor, Asian or white, man or woman, gay or straight, any religion or none at all, you are entitled to the full rights and responsibilities of citizenship.”

Booker directly addressed the “hypocrisy” of Donald Trump in his treatment of women and Muslims, as well as noted how Trump has tried to “get laughs at other people’s expense, tried to incite fear at a time we need to inspire courage, tried to rise in the polls by dragging our national conversation into the gutter.” Becoming increasingly animated, Booker then listed all of the reasons why Hillary Clinton is the candidate who knows “you and I, together, interdependent, [are] interconnected with one single interwoven American destiny.” He also appealed to viewers’ patriotism, noting, “You can’t love your country without loving your countrymen and your countrywomen.”

But as usual the First Lady hit it out of the park…….

Monday night, Michelle took her own place in the spotlight at Philly’s Wells Fargo Center, telling the crowd that Hillary Clinton is the only person she trusts to “have the power to shape our children for the next four or eight years of their lives.” As for Melania’s cribbed speech: no mention from Michelle. She also didn’t mention Donald Trump by name, though her target was clear when she said: “When someone is cruel or acts like a bully, we don’t stoop to their level,” the AP reports. “When they go low, we go high,” she said.

Obama praised Clinton for having the “guts and the grace to keep coming back and putting cracks in that highest and hardest glass ceiling until she finally breaks through.” The Guardian reports that she finished on a note strong enough to spur “Michelle 2020” speculation: “I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves. And I watch my daughters, beautiful, intelligent black young women, playing with their dog on the White House lawn,” Obama said. “And because of Hillary Clinton my daughters and all our sons and daughters, now take for granted that a woman can be president of the United States. So don’t let anyone ever tell you that this country isn’t great. That somehow we need to make it great again. Because this right now is the greatest country on Earth.”

The winners and loser of the night will come a little later…..

The cost of foreign interventionism is immigration [Opinion]

Even the big news these days is not overseas but rather in Philly….the Dem Convention is underway…..while I still a interested in international relations I will be posting more on politics than geopolitics for the next few days….but never fear I will return to my fave subject after that……

You cannot turn on the TV or read a blog these days without the constant drumming of bullsh*t about the refugees……they are all worried about the influx of immigrants for they will spell the doom of the country.  Of course these are same predictions that were given when the Cubans showed up and then there were the Vietnamese and I am sure that there was some of these fabrications with the Chinese or the Irish or the Italians in days past…..

Have any of these semi-literate dullards ever consider that our interventions are causing some of the refugee problems?

Maybe if they work to help stop all the conflicts then they would not need to stroke out over the refugees that they created…..on second thought probably not……they prefer to spread the lies and innuendoes like peanut butter….

I realize to some I am wasting my time….so this press is for the more literate out there….

More than 4 million Syrians have left their war-torn country since civil war began in 2011, and with ISIS on the move that human flood seeking solace is unlikely to recede any time soon. This spate of refugees comes on top of lesser-known but equally desperate migrations from the sites of early entrants into the last 15 years of war in the Mideast: From Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, millions more seek the safety of the Western world.

The United States have been insulated from these migrant crises thanks to a lengthy, stringent refugee vetting process and the natural barrier of two giant moats in the form of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Our allies in Europe, however, have enjoyed no such guarantees of volition. Refugees are coming, whether they like it or not.

Source: The cost of foreign interventionism is immigration [Opinion] – Red Alert Politics

If you worry about the influx of “foreigners” then stop destroying their country…..or pay the price for the destruction.  That is just too easy to bitch and turn a blind eye….we Americans have been doing that for a century or so…..

It is simple…those that create the mass migrations should pay the price for that act……simple and tidy….it will not fly….NO one likes simple and tidy especially the Right wing.